Coyotes

        The coyotes are howling again tonight. It always sounds like they are trying to outdo one another in rather unorganized turmoil...yips and barks between the sorrowful howls. Some nights multiple groups compete with each other across the valley and it is fun to listen to them. The calls make the night darker and the forest forbidding.
        Well over a dozen wild turkeys wandered through the yard this afternoon and I wondered how many turkeys become meals for coyotes. An adult turkey would make a feast for a coyote, but the big birds easily take to flight ahead of our dogs. Would they be so lucky with a hungry coyote?
        Surely some grouse end up on the coyote’s menu, but I think it is few. Probably more baby grouse are eaten by turkeys. Turkeys will eat nearly anything and eggs of ground nesting birds must be a treat for them. A few-day-old grouse is just like a big insect to a turkey. Adult grouse have few enemies other than the northern goshawk.
        It is easier to imagine a young adult grouse flying fatally into a tree as it flees some peril, whether four footed or airborne.

Trail cam picture of a coyote below Camp Grouse.

 

Fishing Small Streams

                In the North Country, small streams mean wild trout. Few things are more fun than poking around the back country looking for small streams to fish. In the hottest weather of the summer those back country streams may be the only places cold enough to keep trout active and healthy.
                But those small streams can be a challenge.

                Below our home is a stream filled with brook trout. Spring freshets sometimes move the stream, not just the bottom but the whole stream may find a new course. Storms any time of the year can raise havoc with the banks.
                Where the stream twists through a softwood forest, fallen trees crisscross over the water. Some of those trees, after the stream has chewed at the bank where it grew, left huge cavities when they no longer had earth enough to hold onto. The water then carves away at the newly exposed soil and before long is nibbling away at the roots of a neighboring tree. The process is endless.
                Parts of the stream weave through meadows and alders. The fishing may be easier there, but the trout have less protection from avian predators. And the biggest trout get the pick of the cover.
                Sit on the bank and spend some time trying to figure out how to drop a fly among the tangle of logs and you may fool an outsize trout from that small stream. Hooking him is one thing, landing him is another.

 

Beaver Dams

      One of our property bounds is a trout stream. The state Fish and Game Department dump some trout in that stream every year, but there are more wild trout swimming about than stockers. Every summer I fish it and occasionally bring home a few trout to eat.
      Fishing it upstream last summer, I came upon a large beaver dam, nearly waist high on the downstream side. Upstream, water was backed up as far as the eye could see. My dogs were with me, as they usually are when I’m fishing that stream, and, rather than stay on the banks as they usually do, one decided to swim across the beaver pond. I called them both in and skedaddled. Beavers around dogs make me nervous ever since I read of a German shepherd killed by a beaver while swimming.

The dam in December

      I had planned to trek back there to fish the pond without the dogs for company, but never got there. It looked like a difficult place to fish, with alders leaning on from the banks on both sides. From our home, whenever the stream is up, we can hear the water tumbling through and over that dam, a frequent reminder that the pond is there.

The new dam is flooding the field. 

            Now the beaver has another dam upstream that is flooding an old pasture. It is easily visible from the road into our place.  It will be interesting fishing next spring. 
      In the slow moving water of old beaver ponds, silt settles out of the water and eventually fills in the pond. Sometimes these filled in ponds create meadows and these openings in the forest are always fun to find. The flat bottoms of valleys were created over the ages by beavers and the filled in ponds they left behind. 

A Change in the Weather

      The weather during October and early November had been particularly warm and windless, possibly a record setting warmth. Warm weather makes for uncomfortably hot hunting and overheated dogs. Gamebirds don’t burn as many calories during warm weather, so they don’t move about feeding. And the windless October, with almost no air movement, created tough scenting conditions that were not ideal for the dogs. A change was finally forecast.
      The abrupt drop in temperature would startle the young-of-the-year grouse. It would be something they had never experienced, which would be to our advantage. And a promised breeze would move bird scent around, helping the dogs find the birds.
       We hunted a cutting that loggers had been picking away at for several years. The land sloped gently to the south with small hills and gullies breaking up the terrain. In some of the hollows the ground was damp and filled with weeds. Unmerchantable slender softwood trees remained in clusters while scattered small hardwoods stood widely spaced everywhere. Skid trails made for fairly easy walking.
      As we started down the slope, the thought was the birds would seek the warmth of sunshine on the south facing slopes. Shortly, Mollie found the first bird on a southwest side of a knoll and locked up on point. Upslope a short ways stood a cluster of softwoods for shelter. A hundred feet downhill a small stream trickled, providing water and a gravel source. What more could a grouse want?
      In an area of not more than four or five acres the two dogs moved eleven ruffed grouse. What a morning. 

Stock Fit

Volumes have been written about shotgun stock fit. Most of us bumble along with factory fit stocks. Certain guns, like the Remington models 870 and 1100 series seem to fit a wide verity of shooters. Others not so much. In our land of mass production, the manufacturers try to produce guns to fit “the average American”. But every manufacturer has a different idea of what size and shape the “average American” is.
     My first gun, back when the only thing I knew about shotguns was that I wanted one, was an old Ithaca side by side. I couldn’t hit a barn with it, so I sold it to my brother. My second gun was an old Parker 12 gauge. Birds just seem to fall out of the sky wherever I pointed it. After reading a bit, I figured out the Ithaca was cast for a right-handed shooter and the Parker for a lefty. I am a lefty.
     Cast is when the stock is bent at the wrist to accommodate the shooter. A left-handed shooter wants the stock bent out to the left of the centerline and a righty wants it the other way. The amount the stock is bent depends on the shooter’s physique and a person trained in stock fitting can tell you how much it needs to be.  Some who measurer gunstock fit have fancy try-stocks that are adjustable in every imaginable direction. Cast for a right-handed shooter is called cast off, for a left-handed shooter cast on. Almost no American single barrel shotguns are cast and very few over-and-unders or side-by-sides are cast. In Europe things are entirely different.
     An early Browning Citori I owned wanted to shoot to the right. Bending the stock only a small amount corrected that. My go to shotgun for the last few years has been a Connecticut Shotgun Manufacturing Company RBL. It has a straight stock and it too wanted to shoot to the right. I first noticed this with birds crossing to the right almost always fell, but to the left was a different story. My tendency is to shoot behind fast flying birds but with the gun shooting to the right if gave me an automatic lead on birds crossing in that direction.
     Repeatedly I tried to teach myself to mount the gun with my left eye centered between the barrels. I thought I was getting better at it. But it is tough to teach and old dog new tricks.

     But then this past winter I dusted off an old Parker 20 gauge with no cast and stock dimensions that are identical to the stock of that RBL. The one difference was the thickness of the stock. Birds dropped this past fall as if by magic. When I bring the gun to my cheek my left eye is dead center looking down the barrels. The RBL came up to my cheek with the barrel centerline just a smidge off to the left. It was obvious that I needed to take a rasp to my RBL’s stock.
     Before starting, I made a template of the stock’s shape where the stock came to rest against my cheek. Using a rasp, I started to take away wood, checking with the template to see how much was gone. With an eighth of an inch taken away, the gun came up to my cheek exactly the same as the old Parker, my left eye looking straight down the rib between the barrels. The stock was then sanded smooth before refinishing it. Even when I explain what I have done to the stock, people cannot notice the missing wood.
     And what a difference it made to my shooting.

  

The RBL next to a dead grouse.